Budget AMD Opteron 3200 Revealed For Web Hosting

AMD has announced a new Opteron 3200 processor, designed for more budget conscious web hosting.

The chips are aimed at those providing web hosting who face a large bill to set up their hardware initially, meaning that they may have to employ desktop, not server, hardware to get going. In the past, at least.

However, the Opteron is a server-level product at an affordable level, and is matched up against Intel's Xeon E3 range of chips. John Fruehe, AMD's marketing director for enterprise products, told V3.co.uk: "This 3200 series is going to be the first product to deliver desktop-class economics with server-class reliability."

Server-class means, broadly speaking, a longer lifecycle than desktop processors, and more reliable chips, taking into account that they're run constantly.

The new chips are a single socket solution with between four and eight cores, based on Bulldozer CPU core technology as seen on the Opteron 4200 and 6200 in 2011. The quad-core CPU has 8Mb of cache, doubled up to 16Mb with the eight-core processor. They run at a maximum of 2.7GHz, and sip power with a TDP (Thermal Design Power) of between 45 Watts and 65 Watts.

The Opteron 3200s are priced from $99 to $229, with AMD claiming that the chips represent a 60 per cent increase in terms of performance per dollar when compared to its rival Intel's offerings.